Charlotte Brontë: Shirley

Shirley, Charlotte Brontë's second novel, published in
1849 two years after JaneEyre, is set in the early years of
the nineteenth century at the time of the Napoleonic Wars and the
Luddite riots. The first edition, as was standard at the time, was
published in three volumes. At the start of the novel Charlotte
Brontë, stung by some critics' condemnation of the passion and
emotion in Jane Eyre, insists that this new novel will be
unlike what has gone before. Addressing her readers she asks: “Do
you anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect
passion, and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations;
reduce them to a lowly standard. Something real, cool and solid
lies before you; …

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